'Producing Exile: Diasporic Vision in Adichie's Half of a Yellow'

650 Diasporic Vision in Adichie producing exile: diasporic vision in adichie's f half of a yellow sun Susan Strehle "For surely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons, and exiles than ever before in history . ." —Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism Diaspora involves both burdens and gifts. Those who suffer exile have experienced the catastrophic loss of homeland; displaced by traumatic violence from homes they will not recover, they may never experience a sense of belonging to a home again. At the same time, émigrés arrive in a space liberated from nationalism, with its damaging assumptions of homogeneity and unity, and their new, defamiliarized place makes possible a transgressive and resistant politics and sociality. The diasporic subject inhabits two locations and takes on internal divisions and doublings. Invoking W. E. B. Du Bois, R. Radhakrishnan identifies in diasporic subjects a version of double-consciousness, brought from past to present location: "If the diasporic self is forever marked by a double consciousness, then its entry as legitimate citizen into the adopted homeland is also neces- sarily double" (Diasporic 174). V. Y. Mudimbe and Sabine Engel agree that "Members of diasporas define themselves in terms of at least a double identity" rather than the "unconditional fidelity" of national citizens (4), and can therefore "think, live, and work as international MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 57, number 4, Winter 2011. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. Strehle 651 citizens, or citizens of a globalized world" (5).1 In a divided and con- tradictory relation to place, these subjects may mourn the loss of rootedness; simultaneously, from an "uprooted" position, they may criticize both previous and present places.2 Producing this doubled diasporic vision, the experience of diaspora involves loss and gain, painful displacement and liberatory relocation. Postcolonial thought has often emphasized the positive aspects of diaspora, minimized its costs, and overdetermined its potential to generate cultural hybridities and transnational subjectivities. Emerg- ing from a poststructuralist acknowledgment of the instability of meaning and identity, and founded on a critique of the nation state as inherently essentialist and identitarian, postcolonial theory has too readily affirmed the exile's potential for cosmopolitan liberation and the transformative politics of what Homi Bhabha calls "unhome- liness" (13). Bhabha sees diasporic subjects, "wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse," as models for postcolonial thought (236). The intellectual, he believes, thrives best outside the nation: "It is from this hybrid location of cultural value—the transnational as the translational—that the postcolonial intellectual attempts to elaborate a historical and literary project" (248). Near the end of Culture and Imperialism, Edward W. Said similarly argues that the mission of intellectual liberation rests now within diasporic figures whose dual orientation to two homelands and cultures gives them a poignant awareness of the "contrapuntal" and connected nature of the global world. Inhabiting a space "between the old and the new" (332), the "unhoused" postcolonial exile refuses the nationalist sense of identity as "purely one thing" (336) and recognizes instead the "startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale" (330). Said ascribes to the consciousness "of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages" (332). While he acknowledges the anguish in this "unhappiest" age of exile—which he describes in "Reflections on Exile" as "the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home" (173)—Said also affirms the "originality of vision" available to an exilic artist (186). Believing that exiles and émigrés have moved beyond interpellation by the nation state, Bhabha and Said see these figures as potentially liberated and liberatory, able to speak to a cross-cultural and transnational cosmopolis.3 Without forgetting that destabilizations and border-crossings can be transformative, or that our global age requires alternative approaches to community beyond the reductive patriotism of nation states, a postcolonial understanding of diaspora must also remember 652 Diasporic Vision in Adichie its often tragic costs. In regions where underdevelopment, govern- ment corruption, and ethnic tensions accompany decolonization, these costs fall on subaltern victims more often than on the intel- lectuals and artists who record their losses of home, kin, safety, and homeland. The double-consciousness experienced by diasporic subjects may be more paralyzing than illuminating; their nostalgia for what is lost, permanently alienating. As David Theo Goldberg writes in criticizing Bhabha's affirmation of hybridity as "inherently, automatically transgressive" (72), we need to "take seriously the doubleness of hybrid consciousness, not just its in-betweenness but its 'caught-betweenness,' and accordingly not just the ambivalence it produces but its almost inevitable duplicity" (83). Between cultures, the diasporic subject may also appear as a threatening presence, an unassimilable specter of the foreign, in the new homeland. Indeed, as Amy Kaplan points out, nationalism requires the production and repression of the foreign: "a sense of the foreign is necessary to erect the boundaries that enclose the nation as home" (25), and thus the nation produces the foreign—not only outside the homeland, but inside, in the exclusive safe zone.4 Kaplan argues that nations must then colonize "specters of the foreign that lurk inside and outside" the borders of homeland (50). In a global context ruled by the homogenizing logic of nation states and the targeting of "terrorist" infiltrators, diasporic subjects may suffer worse consequences than nostalgia and regret. Conditions of double exile, persecution, and invisibility follow for some diasporic migrants, ineluctably foreign "specters" within the nation. Measuring the costs of diasporic experience in the postcolonial nation is, I will argue, the complex subject of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for fiction in 2007, the novel established Adichie's reputation even before she won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008. Adichie creates in Half of a Yellow Sun rich metaphors for the public history of Nigeria in the private lives of imagined individuals who re- flect the divided heritage of postcolonial subjects. In writing about the Biafran War, which resulted in the deaths of over two million people, Adichie has narrated the conditions under which, in one national location, postcolonial African history produced massive suffering among refugees and migrants. Adichie's novel depicts the inevitable failure of the nation created by British colonialism and grounded in the Western myth of the nation as a single family of those born (natio) to a homo- geneous clan. The violations of the social contract in Nigeria, made vivid in sanctioned genocidal murders of the Igbo minority, fracture the nation, and the doomed war for Biafran independence strips the novel's protagonist-witnesses of their status as citizens and propels Strehle 653 them into diaspora. In the first days of the war, they lose homes; by the war's end, they lose homeland—not simply because Biafra is defeated, but also because their experiences have shaped them as permanent outsiders. The loss of Biafra renders these figures spec- tral in their powerlessness and foreign in their alienation from the triumphant nation. Adichie represents in her novel the emergence of a diasporic vision, conscious of the vicious exclusivity implicit in nationalism and attuned to the costs of diaspora. This essay explores the novel's diasporic vision, first in the public and historical realm, showing how the novel traces the fracturing of community to British colonization of Nigerian lands and peoples. As the novel opens after independence, characters hope for a national culture crossing tribal lines, but this potential dissolves. The "divide and rule" policies of colonization, followed by the British design of a Nigerian constitution favoring its own financial interests and sup- ported by a nationalistic drive toward homogeneity, together foster genocide, war, and the creation of millions of refugees. These same colonial legacies shape private lives and minds, leaving ingrained assumptions of value that undermine personal communities. The second section of the essay shows how the novel represents the fraying of private bonds and the fracturing of home. Adichie departs from the chronological ordering that her historical subject would appear to dictate and inverts chronology in parts two and three; this structure emphasizes the discord among characters at the personal level and highlights parallels between private and public versions of the "house divided." Because she writes to recover a repressed history, Adichie wants her account of the Biafra War to be credible. She comments that "there is a deeply politicized feeling among many Nigerians that Biafra should be forgotten" (Wickett), but she believes that people need to learn from

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